The institutions of WEIRD experimentalism (festivals, labels, residencies, arts councils) function as filters of legibility. Their curatorial logic favours the recognizable over the unknown. “Experimental” becomes a genre, its gestures repeatable and safe. To secure funding, an artist must articulate a clear concept: slowness, silence, perception, ecology, technology. The rhetoric of the grant mirrors the rhetoric of the review, which in turn mirrors music that has itself become rhetorical.
This feedback loop produces what might be called administrative radicalism: works that sound daring but behave bureaucratically. The surface may be unpredictable, but the structure beneath (festival schedule, artist bio, critical framing) remains unshaken.
Here Catherine Liu’s notion of virtue hoarding is indispensable. In
Virtue Hoarders (2021), Liu describes how the professional-managerial class transforms moral virtue into symbolic capital: ethics become performance and refinement is proof of superiority. In experimental music, this logic manifests as aesthetic virtue-hoarding. Patience, attention, subtlety and restraint are not just artistic values – they are moral credentials distinguishing the WEIRD avant-garde from the vulgarity of commercial or populist sound.
To compose slow music about silence, or to perform a forty-minute drone with perfect stillness, is to signal belonging to a moralized elite: a community equating control with purity, refinement with righteousness. Festivals and residencies are not just platforms but temples of virtue display. Each act of “radical” listening functions as a certificate of ethical taste. The audience’s stillness, the artist’s humility, the curator’s seriousness – all circulate as signs of moral distinction.
This is why the same artists recur. Their presence reassures institutions they are on the right side of virtue, that the event remains within the parameters of moralized taste. Risk is ritualized, not lived; difference is preserved as brand identity. Liu’s framework exposes how the avant-garde’s performance of humility—the quiet, self-effacing tone of the composer in the black sweater—is also a performance of superiority, a bourgeois modesty weaponized into hierarchy.
Within this ecosystem, certain affects acquire moral status: patience, restraint, attentiveness. To sit through a ninety-minute drone in an unheated church is to enact virtue. The audience’s composure becomes part of the piece. Photos of such events (rows of motionless listeners bathed in amber light) circulate as proof of communal transcendence. But this transcendence is exclusionary, privileging those who can afford stillness.
Virtue-hoarding becomes an aesthetic economy. As Liu observes, the professional-managerial class converts ethics into cultural sophistication, thereby governing the listening culture. Serious listening displays class discipline; enduring the slow and subtle marks one as endowed with time, education and composure. In the WEIRD canon, sonic minimalism doubles as moral maximalism, every frequency resonating with ethical self-regard.
In this sense, the “radical” act of listening quietly becomes indistinguishable from the “virtuous” act of consuming responsibly. The WEIRD experimentalist and the ethical consumer share a fantasy: refinement equals redemption. To listen to Radigue is to detox from Spotify; to attend a Wandelweiser concert is to renounce the noise of capitalism – while remaining entirely within its structures of privilege.
